Following Facebook, LinkedIn has been the latest victim of a data breach, with scrap data from over 500 million users being sold on a common hacking site. Email addresses, cell phone numbers, job records, full names, account numbers, social media profiles, and gender information were among the information leaked.
LinkedIn has confirmed the news, claiming that the data was collected from other websites and businesses rather than a hack. “We reviewed an alleged collection of LinkedIn data that was advertised for sale and determined that it is simply an aggregate of data from a variety of websites and companies,” according to LinkedIn.
According to a Cyber News, the unknown post author leaked 2 million records as proof-of-concept samples on the hacker website. “The four leaked files contain information about the LinkedIn users whose data was allegedly scraped by the threat actor,” according to the study, “including their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, and more.”
The hacker has requested a four-digit sum in the US dollars, preferably in bitcoins, in exchange for the complete information on leaked LinkedIn info. However, it’s unclear if the threat actor is exchanging current LinkedIn user data or scrap data from past LinkedIn and other company hacks.
“Publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn” is among the data released by the hacker, according to LinkedIn. No private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we were able to check, so it can’t be considered a “data breach,” the company said.
Meanwhile, since Italy has the largest number of subscribers among European countries, the country’s privacy watchdog has opened an investigation into the alleged data breach. LinkedIn users in the country are also being warned to be aware of any suspicious behaviour involving their bank accounts or phone numbers, according to the watchdog. Experts believe that the allegedly leaked data could be used to launch targeted phishing attacks, spam 500 million emails and phone numbers, and brute-force LinkedIn profile passwords.
A huge data breach at Facebook this week revealed the personal information of about 533 million users in a similar incident. On April 6, the social media behemoth released a blog in which they admitted to a data breach, but added that the information was stolen in 2019.
Millions of users’ personal information was revealed, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates, and so on. Facebook also confirmed that the leaked data was not accessed via its framework and had been deleted prior to September 2019. Cybercriminals scraped the data using the social networking site’s communication importer feature, according to the study.
